Jack Frost
by Lex Munro
Summary: Part of my Fateverse. Set immediately before Gemini. Tom Shepherd is a Head Analyst for the Fate Network, and his twin brother makes snowflakes. No pair. Warnings: language, sci-fi, past character death.
1. Bullet Time Baby

Tom Maximoff, Analyst 013, the other of the two Head Analysts.

**warnings:** AU - Fateverse. sci-fi. technobabble. rampant bad 616 references. language: pg-13 (primetime tv plus s***).

**pairing:** none/gen.

**timeline:** Network Operations 3652 (AD 6188).

**disclaimer:** characters belong to marvel. au and au versions belong to me.

**notes:** 1) Tom is probably a couple thousand years old. he and Pietro are utterly indispensable to Network Operations, much like the Programmers, so they receive consistent life-extension. 2) Traveler!Wade kicked the Hunter's butt back in **Singularity** (**Blood & Tears**). 3) somebody's "bread and butter" is his basic workload. it's his living, his livelihood. 4) Auditor!Hope met Eight-ball in **Call for Pickup** (**The Collector**).

visit The Fateverse Glossary (merianmoriarty (dot) deviantart (dot) com/art/Fateverse-Glossary-174203180) for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.

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><p><strong>Bullet-Time Baby<strong>

Tom Maximoff is good at what he does. He's the best (no matter what his uncle claims). He was the one who caught the Civil War event—came on shift and had it staring him in the face like a moldy orange in a fruit bowl.

Most of the Core doesn't even bother to speculate about what's going on in the timestream above the grey band (admittedly, doing anything about it would be illegal for most people, anyway).

Tom lives at the point-oh. Half of his day is spent there, floating at the top of the multiverse, watching dots of light dance across a millimeter-thick film before their past plays out below in strands and strings. By contrast, Pietro prefers it down there in the middle of greb, hanging over the shoulders of their field agents, watching every twist and twirl of every active assignment. Tom thinks it's a waste of time and energy to assume that the agents can't do their jobs without constant monitoring.

As far as he knows, he's the only Analyst in the whole Network who would be just as happy with the raw datastream.

Every shift starts with a quick scan of greb while his control seat ascends the Core Monitoring Chamber. On his way, he flags persistent anomalies for their respective Senior Analysts to deal with. In the dark and serene reaches of the point-oh, Tom's every breath is devoted to watching more than a thousand pixels of light split, flicker, and merge. It's like watching a cosmic switchboard. The medics have imposed a strict six hour limit to the shifts of the Head Analysts, but Tom has always felt like he could do it all day; to him, it's the most relaxing job he's ever had.

Here, looking down on the timestream from above, he can almost predict the movements of the bundles. That's the Core—steady as a rock. That's BB—a firm dot following three neighboring bundles so closely that it's almost impossible to tell that it's actually the one leading. That's MP—bursting into fireworks and converging again, splintering into up to fifty secondary bundles on a given day before agreeing again and then splitting again. That's WM—it makes ugly bubbles up here that resolve into neat loops down below.

It's only here, above greb, that a certain kind of anomaly can be spotted.

For an instant, a flicker, a millisecond, the point-oh goes black. In the wake of this flicker, the simulation twists and shivers—only above greb.

This is his life. This is existence at the speed of thought.

He's a bullet-time baby.

Tom has another advantage over his uncle: he never second-guesses himself. Ever.

He throws the stability alarm and pulls up a channel to the Sysadmin.

When he speaks, he speaks at a reflexive speed; the Sysadmin has never had trouble understanding, even if 'normal' people hear it as fast-forward gibberish. Tom suspects that the Sysadmin is a computer program, like Anthony and the quacks keep saying (or maybe he has a high-speed speech parsing software). "One minute down of point-oh—awaiting conf unup."

The fragment replays at high speed, and the shiver becomes a blatant flash of one picture to a completely different one. The simulation flashes red.

In the wake of the fiasco with the Hunter and having to replace several Keepers, the list of people who could be sent to deal with an unup is very short.

The Auditor was a man who balanced easygoing discretion with a unique capacity for violence. After the initial exploration, all the charting and determining what was and wasn't structurally important, unups were the Auditor's bread and butter. This would've been a job for him, no questions asked—if he were still alive.

No matter what kind of training she's had, the new auditor doesn't have the experience or the firepower to deal with an unup on her own. No one but the original Auditor would be crazy enough to try, because it could be some naïve little sorcerer just beginning to dabble with real magic, but it could be a timestream rogue trying to engineer his own paradise.

Tom spends three whole seconds deciding the best course of action. Not a long time for most people. Wastefully indecisive for him.

His hand flies through the form commands. Bureaucracy is a pain, but the paperwork is how the Sysadmin keeps track of things, and it's how the Netcon is held accountable to the public. A form to assign the trace to Node 250, a form to assign resolution of the unup situation to Node 218, a special form to recommend cooperative resolution…

The arm of his control chair beeps an incoming transmission warning; he accepts it with a flick of the wrist.

_~"Hope Summers AR553-Omega,"~_ says the redhead on the chair's projector.

"Tom Maximoff NC085," he replies. "Auditor, your immediate action is required on an unup."

She looks sheepish. _~"I…I don't know what that is."~_

He blinks. "Unup," he says again. "Unauthorized upstream tuning. Either somebody's playing around with reality-altering powers, or somebody's going forward and bringing shit back. It skews pretty much all of our projections to bring things back from above the point-oh. It's why we don't _go_ above the point-oh. Could send the whole thing crashing down around our ears."

_~"Oh."~_

"Oh," he echoes sarcastically. "We usually send the Auditor to take care of unups, because he was generally assumed to be just about the most dangerous and capable agent in the entire Network, but since you haven't been solo long, I want you to get help on this. You remember Node 250 Eight-ball?"

_~"Yeah."~_

"You'll need him to do the trace. Used to have to send the Cartographer or risk data corruption on the Savant, but that's why we made Eight-ball. After that, I recommend sliding to Node 017 Apollo to get the assistance of his new Keeper. The DBA should be able to pass you all the info you'll need on those. Good luck, and try not to let the timestream implode."

_~"Um. Thanks?"~_

He closes the channel as the simulation returns to normal.

Again, the relaxing dance of light pixels, the shape of the present predicting the future.

"God, I love my work."

**.End.**


	2. Jack Frost

another quickie that attacked me out of nowhere. Analyst 013 lives in a room with a man who makes snowflakes.

**warnings:** AU - Fateverse. sci-fi. technobabble. fwuff. rampant bad 616 references. reference to past character deaths. language: g.

**pairing:** none/gen (reference to past Billy/Teddy).

**timeline:** Network Operations 3652 (AD 6188).

**disclaimer:** characters belong to marvel. au and au versions belong to me.

**notes:** 1) the title is a reference to the mythical being who brings cold weather and draws ice ferns on windows on frosty mornings. 2) natural snowflakes are six-sided, due to the molecular geometry of water. the varying shapes and sizes of snowflakes would make it pretty easy to store sixteen-dimensional data on one, especially something as simple as a string of letters and numbers. 3) Wanda died around NO 700; the twins were probably born sometime around NO 690. 4) remember, 'the Fridge' is the nickname for the Null-resonance Detention Facility (because the bulk of its population is in cryogenic stasis).

visit he Fateverse Glossary (merianmoriarty (dot) deviantart (dot) com/art/Fateverse-Glossary-174203180) for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.

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><p><strong>Jack Frost<strong>

The only place Tom Maximoff finds as soothing as the point-oh of the Core Monitoring Chamber is a special high-clearance cell.

The cell is dimly lit, just like the CMC. No windows, one door that can only be opened by a Head Analyst or a Head Programmer. In the darkness, a lone figure sits and makes snowflakes.

Not paper snowflakes, folded up and snipped out.

Snowflakes. Little ones. Out of ice crystals.

Each one is different. Each one is hand-made. Each one can be translated into data, and corresponds exactly to a subject designation.

A specially designed monitoring program catches a snapshot of each snowflake once it's finished, compares it to data from the Core Tower, and flags the appropriate subject.

Their little Jack Frost makes snowflakes of those who are about to die. The higher the entropy caused by the death, the more advance warning he gets, and the more likely it is that they'll be able to intercede.

Most of these snowflakes get flicked away carelessly, and melt. Some of them get eaten, touched to the tip of their creator's tongue. And some of them are gently set aside, where they glow blue and stay frozen, a pile of precious, ended lives.

The first snowflake was their mother, though nobody realized it at the time. She had cancer. No one in the Core had ever seen cancer before. The medics had no idea what to do. They didn't even know what to call it until they found the DR bundle, and by then she'd been dead twenty years.

Tom watched his brother make a snowflake with his magic and blow it away. Five minutes later, they got the news that their mother had died.

It was eight years before Reed saw Will making a snowflake and said, "What's that he's doing?"

And Tom had worriedly said, "Nothing. He's not doing anything. It's just a snowflake." Their mother had warned them all their lives that Will's magic could be a death sentence if he mishandled it.

"It's fractal data," Reed had corrected, and had the room's camera capture a still-frame of the finished snowflake just before Will puffed it away. "If we fold this here…it's…it's a quantum bit! It's…a subject designation! This is remarkable!"

And Tom had slowly breathed out, because 'remarkable' coming from Reed Richards invariably meant 'important,' and that meant that nobody would be allowed to take Will and stick him in the Fridge.

Will didn't start losing himself until the first snowflake he kept. He made it, and then he kept it without seeming to know why. A week later, his boyfriend died in a monorail accident. Little by little, as the pile got bigger, he withdrew more and more from everyday life.

Now he hardly bothers with anything but the snowflakes. He just sits there in his room, making little fractal crystals out of magic. He's happy as a clam, too—smiling and sometimes humming, like they're just snowflakes, like he's just making them for fun, not like they flawlessly predict death. He asks for certain foods when he's craving them, and he once asked for a new pair of socks. They'd give him almost anything, if he asked. They give him life extensions because _Tom_ asked.

The only thing that lulls Tom to sleep is watching the blue glow of magic while his brother makes snowflakes.

So Tom lives with Will.

"How was work?" Will asks automatically. He never listens to the answer, but Tom always answers anyway.

"Got an unup. Sent the new Auditor to deal with it."

"That's nice," Will says airily, and gently drops the newest snowflake onto the luminescent pile. After all this time, it's a sizeable drift; it's hip-deep and covers half the floor.

"Why d'you keep 'em?" Tom asks. "What're you gonna do with 'em?"

"Hm?" says Will as he starts the next snowflake. "Oh. I was thinking of making a snow-Teddy. Or a castle. He'd like a castle. They're always the prettiest, his snowflakes."

Tom smiles. Yeah, Teddy was the kinda guy who'd like a snow-castle. "Did you eat?" he yawns, toeing his shoes off.

"Uh-huh. Uncle Pete came to see me, so we had salmon and pilaf."

"Good."

"Shouldn't sleep in your clothes," Will admonishes as Tom flops down on the bed.

"I only sleep for two hours at a time anyway," Tom replies with singular lack of concern.

The play of snow-light on Will's face is already making Tom incredibly drowsy.

"Well, get under the blanket, at least," says Will. The blanket tucks itself around Tom with a faint blue glow anyway.

Tom dreams that his brother builds a snow-Teddy, wings and all. He'd tease, but Teddy was pretty awesome, and the snow-Teddy is pretty awesome, too.

He doesn't know it, but he smiles in his sleep, and Will stops making snowflakes and just watches, because this is the best part of his day.

**.End.**


	3. Snowflakes

almost entirely the result of me going "i wonder what would happen if Six met Will."

**warnings:** AU - Fateverse. sci-fi. technobabble. rampant bad 616 references. reference to past character deaths. language: pg-13 (because Tom resorts to the f-word when rudely awakened).

**pairing:** none/gen (reference to past Billy/Teddy).

**timeline:** Network Operations 3652 (AD 6188).

**disclaimer:** characters belong to marvel. au and au versions belong to me.

**notes:** 1) CMC = Core Monitoring Chamber. 2) "Steph," if you'll recall, is Anthony's fiancée, Stephanie Rogers. 3) dendrites are the stereotypical snowflake shape. a stellar dendrite has lots and lots of little branches going off the main branches. google "stellar dendrite," and you'll probably find a decent explanation. geometrically speaking, the term "regular" just means all corresponding sides and angles are equal. 4) CDB = Central Database. 5) a leyline is a magically sensitive border between dimensions (usually between the mortal realm and heaven or hell). more scientifically, a leyline connects important geographical features (like springs), and may be of magnetic or tectonic significance. 6) in snowflake terms, a "plate" is just a flat hexagonal ice crystal with no branches. 7) TMS = Timestream Monitoring Simulation.

visit The Fateverse Glossary (merianmoriarty (dot) deviantart (dot) com/art/Fateverse-Glossary-174203180) for terms, concepts, Nodes, and important people.

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><p><strong>Snowflakes<strong>

There's a reason that Anthony rarely goes to speak with people in person. Quite simply put, he has no way of knowing in advance what kind of impact a particular person will have on his…quirk.

Programmers make the ideas move in uncomfortable fits and starts. Children make the ideas a light-hearted but constant stream. Analysts bring in a wide array of unrelated ideas.

And it depends heavily on what kind of conversation he's having—whether it's engrossing, uninteresting, scatter-brained and side-tracked.

Today, he's had to go to a strange place he's never been before, because Tom apparently doesn't check his messages when he's off-shift, and Tom's the one who caught the unup.

Anthony stares at the door in front of him. Its control panel is more like the lock panels in the lower reaches of the Tower than a residential suite, but the Tower computer insists Tom is on the other side of the door.

So Anthony presses the 'entry' button. (It should tell you something about Anthony that he doesn't pause to worry what's going on inside the room, and whether he might be interrupting something private.)

_~Ident verified,~_ says the panel.

The room on the other side is fairly small (twenty-five-by-twenty, his mind supplies, complete with a blueprint), and quite dark. There's a bed (occupied), a desk, and a chair. About half the floor is taken up by a snow drift that's glowing faintly blue from within, and in the midst of that is a seated figure with its back to the door.

Numbers and letters fill Anthony's vision, crowding out every thought in his head for a moment. Unintelligible, garbled, names and nonsense. Then it all shrinks into stiff, angular branches, clustering and floating at the edges of perception.

The seated figure turns, and in the flickering glow he looks like a carbon-copy of Tom, but with dark hair instead of light.

"Oh," he says. "Hi. I thought I knew everybody who could open the door. You must be a new Programmer."

Anthony's jaw works soundlessly for a moment. He isn't sure what he's about to say. 'Yes,' maybe. Or 'Anthony.' He's stuck on that old, distracted, over-crowded feeling he has without his datapen. Absently, he takes it out of his pocket and starts to trace the fragments drifting around. "Um," he says.

"Are you okay?"

"Six," says Anthony.

"So we're up to six now," says the other man, getting up and walking over. "Are you here to see Tom? He's asleep, but we can wake him up."

'Who are you?' Anthony wants to ask. He manages a shaky, owlish, "Wh-who…?" before he has to swat some errant branches away.

"Let's wake him up. Hey, Tom!" The room's lights come on in a sudden flare of white, and the bedclothes whip away with a blue glow that Anthony is beginning to suspect is magic.

"JesusfuckingChristwhatthefuck—" the figure on the bed screeches, flailing to cover its face with a pillow.

Anthony grimaces in sympathy. For a guy who spends half his day working in low-light, the full illumination setting is probably a very unpleasant wake-up call.

"Will, what the _hell_?" Tom complains from beneath the pillow.

"You have a visitor," says the dark-haired look-alike.

"That's great, turn the lights down, will you? Holy _fuck_."

"Hmph. Well, nobody ever comes to visit _you_, so I thought it must be important. Maybe a work-thing."

The lights dim to half-light.

Tom cautiously emerges from the shelter of his pillow. His hair is tufted, and his eyes are squinting. "Anthony. What the hell are you doing here? You never go new places. You go to work, you go to the CMC, you go places with Steph… I'm surprised you didn't have some kinda meltdown, what with the Teddys." He jerks his thumb toward the snow drift.

"I may be," Anthony admits. "Having some kinda meltdown, that is. Teddys?"

"Long story. Uh, Will, this is Anthony. Anthony, my twin brother, Will."

Will waves. "Hello."

Anthony gestures vaguely to the fractal branches slowly crowding into the edges of his vision again. "Somebody wanna explain what these are?"

Tom groans and gets up. "Well, can't say for sure since I can't see your resonant-crypto-schizo-whatever hallucinations, but they're probably snowflakes."

"Snowflakes," says Anthony, faintly confused.

Will digs carefully through the drift, pokes his finger in, stands up. He walks over to Anthony and holds out his finger. "Snowflakes," he confirms.

Anthony absently scribbles out something about 'large regular stellar dendrite.' The snowflake is almost a centimeter across and perfectly symmetrical.

Snowflakes. The fractal branches in Anthony's vision are simplified twelfths of snowflakes.

"He's made them since we were eleven," Tom says. "Don't know why. Reed immediately thought of fractal data storage, and he whipped up a program that translates each snowflake into a subject designation. Pretty cool, huh?"

Anthony can't even imagine the sort of leap Reed's brain must've made to go from snowflakes to subject designations. He suddenly wonders just _whose_ idea the CDB was.

"It's some kind of reverse-entropy leyline quake, we think," Tom goes on. "When somebody dies, the entropy caused by that person's death makes ripples through the timestream. The greater the entropy, the bigger the ripple, the more advance warning Will gets. For almost three thousand years now, they've used him as a kind of alarm system."

Anthony frowns. "So we had _advance warning_ of the Auditor's death?"

"We had three and a half minutes' advance warning. The entropy level was too low, and we have trouble telling them apart…and he eats them."

Anthony blinks. "He what?"

Tom shrugs a little. "Wade snowflakes. He eats them."

"He can tell who they are?"

"Those ones, sure," Will says. "They don't make the right kind of snowflakes. They make plates."

Another brief surge of snowflake science dances across Anthony's vision in explanation. "Oh."

"It's like they're blank, waiting for the timestream to write them." Will looks at the snowflake on his finger and holds it out again. "Pretty, isn't it?"

"It's, uh. Yeah."

Will smiles. "Teddy's snowflakes are always the prettiest."

"Who's Teddy?"

Will gives a shrug. "A couple thousand years ago, he was my boyfriend. Here, you can keep this one."

Anthony tries to decide what to say. 'That doesn't seem like a healthy coping mechanism,' is one of the appealing options. 'But it'll melt,' is another. "Are you sure?" is what actually comes out of his mouth as he raises his hand palm-up.

"Yeah," Will answers, gently slipping the ice crystal onto Anthony's palm. It's chilly, and glowing faintly blue. "I've got thousands and thousands of him. I mean, they're not exactly alike—of course they're not. But that's okay."

"Is there anyone you don't make snowflakes of?" Anthony asks, staring at the snowflake in his hand. It's _not_ melting.

"Most bad people. Their deaths are high-res." Will makes a thoughtful face. "And mine. I've never made a Will snowflake."

"Why do you make them?"

"Don't know."

"You could _stop_, couldn't you?"

"You could stop _bathing_, couldn't you?" Will snorts. "It's the same feeling. Something just feels _fresher_ afterward. Anyway, Tom can't sleep if I don't make snowflakes."

"We could find him a tranquilizer, or…or some kind of nightlight."

Will shakes his head. "I'm a powerful magic user—like, _really_ powerful. If I don't have something to keep me busy, I'll start accidentally doing unups, and then I'll have to go to the Fridge, and _then_ who'll take care of Tom?" Businesslike, he puts his hands on his skinny hips and firmly shakes his head. "You have to think of these things when you're somebody's brother, you know. And speaking of that, c'mon, Tom, it's time for breakfast. You joining us, Six?"

Anthony's brain wanders back to the reason he went looking for Tom in the first place. "Tom. That unup you spotted."

Tom pauses in the act of trying to finger-comb his hair into behaving. "What about it?"

"The cascading data pattern suggests magic. Intentional or unintentional, I dunno. The Auditor has Eight-ball, I assume he's running a trace. When you go back on-shift, keep your eyes peeled for more."

Scoffing, Tom leads the way out of the room. "That's pretty much my entire job, Anthony. Sit in big floaty chair, open eyes, watch TMS for six hours at a time."

Anthony is left standing awkwardly outside the twins' room with a chilly blue snowflake in his palm while they amble barefoot down the corridor, hand-in-hand.

**.End.**


End file.
